Chapter Text
The house never changed after Jayce’s father died.
Not in the big ways. His clothes stayed in the closet. His boots by the back door. His coffee mug—World’s Best Dad—left on the kitchen counter like a relic, chipped at the lip but too sacred to move. The garage, where it happened, was locked for a year. Then cleaned. Then padlocked again. No one talked about it.
Jayce’s mother was a complicated woman. Poised. Fiercely intelligent. She wore grief like a brooch—visible, deliberate, but ornamental. Controlled. She never screamed. She never sobbed in the street. She attended church. She brought casseroles to neighbors. And when people said, “How are you holding up?” she’d smile and say, “God gives us strength.”
She did love Jayce—fiercely, like ivy clinging to stone. But after his father’s death, the love thickened, settled into something dense and breathless. It wrapped around him, not unkind, but close, damp, and constant, like wool soaked in rain.
She needed him.
Not as a child, but as a companion. Someone to match her silences, someone to hold the other end of the echo. She didn’t say, take care of me , but she said you’re such a good boy with a tremble in her voice, and sometimes kissed his forehead with a pressure that felt like benediction and desperation braided together.
So he learned to be gentle with her moods. To sense the weather in her sighs. He cleaned up after himself. Sat still in the thick hush of her cigarettes. He learned not to cry—because if he cried, she would too, and then no one would survive the flood.
He became her still point. Her reason. Her little man of the house—a house that turned inward, preserving its grief like formaldehyde, every room a reliquary, every silence a shrine.
There were no more parties. No holidays, not really. Just rituals, stripped of celebration. Gifts wrapped and left unopened. Meals served without appetite. They lived like well-mannered ghosts rather than, well, a happy family they still desperately pretended to be.
She still ironed his clothes. Still tucked notes into his lunches—You’re my sunshine. Proud of you always. But if he came home late, or asked the wrong question, her face would flicker—just once, just barely. A breath held. A window slammed shut before the breeze could be named.
He learned to edit himself the way one edits a fragile photograph—soft around the edges, careful not to smudge the light. Her good boy, always.
Because she did love him. She just didn’t know how to love him without needing him.
Jayce never had a rebel phase. No cigarettes in a shoebox. No dyed hair, no nights spent defying curfew. Rebellion, in his world, was not a rite of passage—it was a risk. It meant doors slamming, people leaving, phones ringing in the middle of the night, and Jayce doubted he could handle that.
He wanted rules. Routines. He wanted to be the kind of person who couldn’t be abandoned; acting out wasn’t thrilling—it was dangerous. What if he failed a class and she unraveled again? What if he vanished for a night and returned to find the house dark and the garage door ajar?
So he was good. Not loudly. Not with fanfare. Just steadily, unfailingly good .
Responsibility carved itself into the soft places. Guilt took root where playfulness might have grown. There were no medals for it, no praise—just quiet nods from teachers and the occasional mature for your age . But maturity wasn’t a crown. It was armor—clinging to him like starched linen in summer, stiff and itchy and never quite fitting. He wore it like camouflage, the boy beneath it still crouched, still listening for the creak of the floorboards, still fearing that a single wrong step might bring the ceiling down.
He was the kind of teenager teachers liked. Bright, articulate, sharp but kind. He got good grades without becoming tedious. Took debate seriously. Stayed after school to clean up the science lab. A good kid. Not to impress. Not to perform. But because goodness, for Jayce, was tethering. Goodness kept the lights on. Kept people from leaving.
Because to disappoint is to risk being left. Jayce had learned that early—the way a slammed door could echo for years, the way silence could ring louder than grief.
He still remembered the hiss of the garage closing, the click of the lock, how the air thinned afterward like the house itself was holding its breath. Sometimes, even now, he’d find himself watching doorknobs as if they might turn and vanish someone all over again.
He came of age in a world on fire. The war, the marches, the music like prophecy. The cities breathing heavily with incense and rebellion. Jayce didn’t join in, not at first—but he watched, nonetheless. He listened. He hoarded manifestos, clipped articles, read about transcendentalism and trials in psychedelic therapy with the same hunger he’d once brought to detective novels.
Weirdness felt honest. He had grown up in a house where silence reigned. Where truth was folded in linen and grief wore perfume. The weird, the ecstatic, the unseemly—they didn’t pretend life was normal. They howled what he’d only ever whispered.
It thrilled him. Gave him permission, and, sure enough, he began collecting books. Annotated them with manic intensity. The Oneida Community. The Church Universal and Triumphant. Anton LaVey.
He read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and hated it, then reread it anyway. He wasn’t drawn to the prophets—he was obsessed with the flock. Why do people believe? What makes someone kneel to something unproven? And somewhere beneath it all: Would I?
Journalism was the clean excuse. A sanctioned obsession. He studied it like religion—something that let him dissect the world without becoming too entangled in it. He always gravitated to the stories with a heartbeat just slightly off. The fringe. The liminal. The haunted.
By the time he graduated, he was already writing stories that unnerved people. A doomsday preacher living out of a van. A failed commune in Oregon where everyone bore the same tattoo and refused to speak of what happened in the chapel.
Professors called it incisive. His classmates called it creepy. Jayce turned in his work on time and said nothing.
The Chronicle hired him almost immediately. Modest paper. Small reach. Smoke-stained offices and deadlines that smelled like burnt coffee. Jayce was twenty-two—too bright, too driven. Handsome in a way that made people underestimate him. His first assignments were dull—water boards, local elections, an unexpected influx in pigeon vandalism—but he turned them in early. Never missed a quote. Never said no: he became reliable, and reliability was the closest thing he’d ever known to safety.
He didn’t take sick days. Laughed too loudly when others griped about their parents. Triple-checked every line—not from perfectionism, but from fear. From the deep certainty that one wrong detail could ruin everything. He could charm anyone, deflect like a magician. But when people tried to get close—really close—he pivoted. “Too many skeletons,” he’d say with a wink. “Closet’s full.” But it wasn’t full . Just one.
There was a senior journalist—Howard Keene, Pulitzer-nominated once, now half-retired and always muttering in the back office. He took a shine to Jayce.
Called him kid in that gruff, affectionate way. Showed him how to dig without making enemies, how to read between the lines, how to keep a face straight when someone tells you their worst mistake. Jayce respected him. Liked him, even—but he never let the man see him tired. Never showed him the notebook margins filled with repetitions. Never admitted to losing time.
And there were moments—quiet, forgettable ones—when he would lose time. Where he’d catch his reflection in a storefront and not recognize himself for a flicker. Where the world felt one layer too thin, as if everything around him were set pieces and he was the only one who noticed the paint peeling at the corners.
He never told anyone.
He didn’t think it was important.
He’d just assumed it was a variant of a norm—since he, after all, always had a strange relationship with time. It slipped. Bent in odd places. Hours vanished when he read too deeply into a subject, when he was tracing the thread of some obscure cult or theory or psychological study. Sometimes he’d look up from his desk and the sun would be gone, and he’d feel angry at it—not at himself, but at the light for leaving so quietly. For vanishing like everything else.
He’d forget meals. Whole conversations. There were stretches where he lived like a ghost—silent, hyper-focused, eating only cereal, showering only when the mirror fogged and startled him with his own reflection.
Sometimes he would wake up in his car, parked somewhere unfamiliar. A tape still hissing in the deck. He would pretend he’d just been tired. That he was “burning the candle” or whatever professors said when you looked like shit but still turned in your work on time. But he didn’t remember the drive.
He laughed it off—“Journalist brain,” he’d say. “Running on spite and fumes.” But sometimes he stared at his hands and they didn’t feel like his. He blinked, and the room leaned sideways, and he had those dreams . Always the same. The garage. The rope. The chair, upright and waiting.
He told a girlfriend once—psych student. She looked at him too long. Said, “That’s not normal.”
He never called her again.
He didn’t land the job so much as trap it in a corner and smile until it gave in. He’d shown up without an appointment, collar slightly askew, eyes sharp, voice fast enough to trip itself. Waited an hour in a smoke-yellowed lobby with a copy of Time he didn’t read, then pitched a zoning corruption story like it was a secret dare. He wasn’t charming in the usual sense—he talked too fast, asked too much—but he had that peculiar gravity of someone who needed the story like oxygen. Randall, the editor, squinted through the haze and said, “You always talk this fast?”
“Only when I’m breathing,” Jayce replied.
Randall grunted. Handed him a badge. “Go find something weird.”
It should’ve felt like a test. Jayce treated it like a calling. He didn’t quite believe in dream jobs—he thought the phrase was made up by people who didn’t dream particularly hard—but if he had, this would have been it. A license to ask the wrong questions, poke his head into broken corners, chase after things other people called lost causes or nonsense. He wandered into an abandoned rail yard and came back with a story about a squatters’ commune, a missing dog, and a man who claimed to be the reincarnation of Teddy Roosevelt. It wasn’t clean, but it was good.
Randall printed it without edits. Called Jayce a “stray mutt with rabies and a vocabulary.”
He was a peculiar man, Randall Meritt—late fifties, gravel-voiced, wore a battered trench coat year-round like it was stitched into his skin. Hated hippies. Smoked menthols like a vendetta. Two ex-wives, one half-ruined liver, and the kind of skepticism that made priests twitch. He didn’t care about image. He cared about the story.
He was the first adult Jayce ever truly admired—not for kindness, but for clarity. Randall didn’t pretend. Didn’t coddle. And he saw Jayce plainly: smart, damaged, compulsively driven. A kind of kindred strangeness passed between them, unspoken.
“You’ve got a good eye for freaks, kid,” Randall told him once.
Jayce had grinned. “Takes one to know one.”
Randall barked a laugh, cigarette smoke curling up like punctuation. Didn’t deny it.
Their relationship wasn’t sentimental. It was built on trust and mutual recognition. Randall gave him rope and expected him not to hang himself with it. Trusted him with strange stories, the kind you didn’t assign unless you knew the reporter could handle coming back haunted. He’d call Jayce at 2am and say, “Got a lead on some snake handlers in the hills.” Jayce would grunt, “On it,” and go. Randall never said be careful. Just: “Don’t die.”
He never asked why Jayce chased the weird. He didn’t need to.
He understood.
* * *
He felt it before it landed on his desk.
Not as a vision. Not as some divine spark. Just... a pressure. The sense of something shifting underground. Like when dogs go still before an earthquake, or when the wind changes just before a storm and everyone says it smells like metal, or blood.
Jayce had been twitchy for weeks. He told himself it was the deadlines, or the insomnia, or the fact that the city had started to feel more like a cardboard cutout than a place. He’d stopped drinking coffee. Then started again. He paced the newsroom without realizing. He stared at the same photograph of himself on his press badge for five full minutes one morning, trying to remember if that was really his face.
The office felt too warm, like it always did—windows painted shut decades ago, the radiator hissing faintly though it hadn’t been cold in weeks. Randall leaned back in his chair, the springs groaning beneath him, and fished a cigarette from the crumpled pack on his desk. He lit it slow, the flare of the match casting deep hollows in his face, and offered the pack across the desk without a word.
Jayce took one, tapped it against his knuckle. Smoke trailed up between them, lazy and thin, a gesture more habitual than friendly.
"You’ve got a thing for weird, don’t you?" Randall said finally, squinting through the haze, eyes flicking toward the window though there was nothing out there worth looking at—just the skyline sagging under smog, a line of pigeons balanced on the telephone wire like notes on a staff.
Jayce shrugged, lips quirking dry. "Sure. Freak shows pay better."
Randall huffed something close to a laugh, shaking his head. "It’s the times, kid. Everyone’s got their own little religion now. Christ, the papers can’t print fast enough—Jonestown, Process Church, Manson freaks. Readers eat it up. Hippies gone feral. Like everyone woke up one day and decided the sky was bleeding and their neighbor’s god wasn’t cutting it anymore."
He tapped ash into a chipped mug, leaned forward, elbows on the cluttered desk. The file sat between them like something rotting.
“Parents are squealing about this one,” Randall went on. “Daddy’s got money, a country club name. Girl drops out of college, skips town, starts mailing home postcards about gardens and orchards and other hippie horseshit. Then nothing.”
Jayce flicked ash into an empty coffee mug, already half-tuned out. “So you want me to track down a runaway flower child. What, write about peace, love, and statutory rape?”
Randall’s laugh was dry and low, like something scraping in the vents. “Come on, Talis. You’ve been bitching about wanting something juicy. This is the kind of weird that sells.”
Jayce flipped open the folder again. The girl’s face stared up at him—fresh, sun-flushed, wide-eyed in that brittle way that set his teeth on edge. He turned the postcard over, read the scrawl one more time.
"The orchard is blooming. I can hear them singing under the soil."
It felt rehearsed. Like something she wanted you to believe.
A pause, stretched tight as piano wire. The sounds of the newsroom beyond faded into static. Jayce didn’t like the taste in his mouth—like biting tinfoil, like blood.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “What is that, poetry?”
Randall shrugged. “Some culty shit. Locals call it The Orchard. Don’t know what they’re growing out there, but it’s got the kid hooked. Thought you might want a whiff.”
Jayce exhaled slow through his nose, glancing up. “And what if the runaway girl’s shacked up with her junkie boyfriend in California by now? What if she’s trading postcards for tabs of acid and nobody's seen her sober in weeks?”
Randall gave him that crooked, shark-eyed grin—half pity, half dare. “Then take the damn camera, Talis. Go west. Interview the freaks. Maybe you get a story, maybe you don’t. Hell, maybe you come back smelling like patchouli.”
He laughed at his own joke, a sound low and brittle, shaking his head. “No advance. I’ll give you gas money.”
Jayce thumbed the edge of the postcard again, feeling the groove where the ink pressed too hard. Somewhere outside, a car horn wailed, long and distant, like something dying slow.
He looked up, cigarette burning down between his fingers.
“And when it turns out she wandered into a river instead?”
Randall’s smile didn’t shift. “Then that’s a headline too.”
For a moment neither of them spoke. The fan overhead kept spinning, its shadow slicing the room into strips of light and dark.
Jayce crushed out his cigarette, stood.
“All right,” he muttered, voice gone flat. “I’ll go shake hands with the messiah.”
Randall didn’t watch him leave. Already back to the next folder, next story, next half-assed obituary. Just another body, one way or another.
He packed the way he always did, with the mechanical rhythm of someone going to war with a story. Canvas duffel. Spiral-bound notebooks. Two pens—one black, one red. The Olympus recorder, old but reliable, duct tape around the battery case to keep it from falling open. A Polaroid, just in case. Cassettes. Matches. Pocketknife. The same green army jacket he wore on every assignment that might turn sideways. It still smelled faintly of wet leaves and cheap whiskey from that week in Kentucky when he’d interviewed a preacher who claimed to wrestle angels.
He threw in a pack of Camels, though he didn’t smoke much anymore, and three crumpled paperbacks—Didion, Mailer, and some half-wrecked volume on new religious movements he’d been dog-earing to death. He paused at the bookshelf, considered The Varieties of Religious Experience, then thought better of it. Too much weight, and he already knew how it ended.
He called his mother that night. The phone cord stretched across the tiny kitchen, winding like a noose between his fingers as he listened to her voice click between small talk and silence.
She asked if he’d be home for Easter. He lied and said maybe. She told him the neighbor’s son had joined the army. Jayce made a sound—noncommittal, low—and said he’d be out of town for a few days on a story. “Where to?” she asked, and he looked at the map then, splayed across the table like a patient mid-autopsy, pencil lines and ink circles marking places he hadn’t been yet but already mistrusted. “South,” he said. “Missouri.” She was quiet a moment, then told him to pack socks. He said he would. She didn’t ask what the story was.
She never did.
The map was from a gas station off Halsted, the kind that cost a buck and smelled like oil and old hands. He unfolded it like scripture, smoothing it down beneath the heel of his palm.
Chicago was a knot of roads and lakes and familiar decay. Missouri spread out beneath it like rot under clean skin. He circled the town nearest the last known sighting— Alton , just close enough to the Arkansas line to make the trees turn mean. West Plains, Greer Spring, Thayer. Places that sounded soft if you said them fast but wrong if you said them slow. He traced the route with the butt of his pencil.
Twelve hours, give or take. Longer if the roads got strange.
Nothing about the case made sense yet. That was what kept his hands steady. The girl’s postcard had felt performed , yes—but not insincere. That was the part that scraped. Like she meant every word of it, and still somehow knew she had to sell it.
The orchard is blooming. He kept turning that line over in his head like a worry stone, smooth and untrustworthy. He’d heard enough of these stories to know what came next: missing girl, doting parents, whispers of cults and flower rituals and mind control. LSD breakfasts. Prophets in cotton robes. Hollow-eyed followers who smiled too much and blinked too little. The kind of freak show he was good at covering. But this one felt... old. Not retro. Not counterculture. Older than all that. Like it had roots. Like it had been waiting.
Jayce didn’t believe in premonitions. He didn’t believe in much at all. But there was something in the way the wind moved across the map when he opened the door to leave, something in the way the last corner peeled itself from the table, curling slow, like a finger beckoning.
* * *
The sun leaned hard against the skyline by the time Jayce hit the street, the briefcase thudding soft against his thigh, camera case dragging his shoulder low. The city’s heat clung stubborn, syrup-thick and metallic, settling into the hollows of his lungs like smog that had learned to breathe back. It wasn't just heat, though—it was the weight of the day, of the week, of the slow accrual of something unnamed pressing against the insides of his ribs like a question he hadn’t yet figured out how to phrase.
The lot behind the office yawned in neglect, asphalt cracked and buckling, weeds threading through the seams like veins in a thing too long dead but refusing to rot. A newspaper pinned beneath a tire stuttered once in a listless breeze. It felt like an omen, but then again, so did everything these days.
His car waited like an old dog—loyal, grim, begrudgingly alive. A ’66 Plymouth Valiant, four-door, once white but now the sickly, uncertain color of bones buried too shallow. One hubcap gone. Chrome dulled to a mournful gray. The driver’s side door opened with a sound like breath leaving a dying animal.
He tossed the camera case onto the passenger seat, then the recorder, then reached into the back for the map. The unfolding was ritual, familiar. His fingers found the creases before his eyes found the lines. Oklahoma was nearly smeared out of existence. Missouri remained. But The Orchard—whatever it was, wherever it had buried its roots—wasn’t marked. Places like that don’t appear on maps. They emerge, quietly, like bruises.
He lit a cigarette more out of ritual than desire. The flare of the match briefly painted his hand in gold, the smoke curling up into the dimming light like something trying to leave.
He stared at the smoke as it curled, wondering, not for the first time, why he always felt slightly detached in the moment before a story. Not nerves, not excitement. Something else. Like part of him had already gone ahead without him, waiting up the road.
The radio wheezed to life—static first, then a warbling hymn. Then the voice of a preacher warning of fire and lust and the death of nations. Jayce left it on. He liked the way the words became meaningless when you didn’t listen too closely. He cracked the window, let the air slither in, thick and hot and sour. The city’s heat had followed him—or maybe it never left. Maybe it lived in his lungs now, whispering.
He glanced at the folder on the passenger seat. The girl’s photo looked back, faded and soft at the edges, the kind of softness that came from handling, from fingers that had touched her face too many times hoping for an answer that never came. He turned the postcard over, studying the handwriting more than the phrase itself— The orchard is blooming. I can hear them singing under the soil —because the phrase, though rehearsed to sound profound, was not in itself worthy of much scrutiny. But the hand that wrote it trembled in ways that didn’t match the words. That’s what caught him. That’s what made the skin between his shoulder blades tighten. It was the shape of fear pretending to be faith.
He shifted into gear. The Plymouth shuddered like it resented motion. He pulled out slow. Glanced once in the mirror. Nothing behind him but the city sinking back into itself.
The landscape peeled away in molting layers—brick to dust, neon to vacancy, crowd to hush. There was always a moment when you crossed from somewhere into nowhere—a kind of border drawn not on the map, but in the gut. He felt it pass through him like a fever breaking. The road unfurled, familiar and not. The map twitched in the seat beside him with every turn. He didn’t look. He wouldn’t, not until the road stopped pretending to make sense.
The miles came soft at first. Gentle. The kind of distance that slips through the body before the mind catches up. He drove—one hand on the wheel, cigarette near the filter, the radio muttering sermons and static. The hum of it all began to dull his edges. Not soothing—never soothing—but something quieter than fear. A quietness he remembered from hospitals and churches. A waiting.
He passed towns that barely held shape—just names and one flickering light. Gas stations where no one moved. Motels with curtains drawn tight and televisions glowing behind them like fish tanks. The cornfields came next. Tall. Too tall. Leaves, browned from the summer heat, curled in like ears pressed to doors—listening, always listening.
The landscapes always changed this way the farther he drove from anything real: subtly, then completely. Trees leaning just a little too close to the road. Fields arranged in patterns that felt less like farming and more like ritual. He’d seen this kind of nothingness before—stretching out along desert highways, in swampy southern backroads, even once in Utah, where the land felt hollow beneath the tires. But this felt different. This wasn’t emptiness. This was absence —the kind that suggested something had been here, once, and then chose to leave, quietly and all at once, without telling anyone why.
He realized he hadn’t eaten when his hands began to tremble. Pulled into the first place that didn’t look closed entirely.
A gas station. Squatting low to the ground, concrete stained with something too dark to be oil, a single pump listing to one side like a broken tooth. The sign read “SERVE-U”, the letters sun-bleached and birdshit-flecked. The place looked deserted, but the light inside the shack burned weak and yellow, flickering as if uncertain whether it had the strength to keep burning at all.
The gravel wasn’t gravel. It shifted, wrong beneath his tires—too fine, too soft, like a sound swallowed before it could echo. Jayce stepped out and stretched, the motion slow and deliberate, his eyes never quite leaving the gas station, as if turning his back might provoke something into shape. The air was heavier here. Clotted. No birds. No insects. Just heat, thick as breath held too long, and the low, persistent whine of electricity, like something alive and dreaming in the walls.
He gave the place a long, flat look. This wasn’t a place—not really. It was a type of place. One of many. A shape he’d seen before in other states, other hours, when the world thinned out and left behind only echoes. These stops lived on the edge of the map, half-forgotten and too stubborn to vanish, their bones showing through peeling paint and flickering bulbs. They were meant to be passed through, not seen. Not lingered in. But they always noticed you, and they always remembered when you stayed too long.
The man inside the store watched him with the stillness of a photograph—eyes dull but fixed, as if recording rather than seeing. Not wary. Not curious. Just aware, in the way old statues are aware of the rooms they’ve been left in.
Jayce hesitated at the threshold, squinting into the dimness, then stepped inside. The air was cooler but no less heavy, thick with the scent of plastic, dust, and something older beneath it—something like mildew, or maybe root rot. The shelves were skeletal, spaced too far apart, half-stocked with things that looked as though they hadn’t been touched in years. The layout was wrong in a subtle, stomach-turning way—as if it had been designed by someone who had never seen a store but had once heard one described through a dream.
Jayce moved slowly, choosing a Coke, a bag of chips, though he wasn’t hungry. It felt like a script he was meant to follow. He let the chips crinkle, too loud in the silence, as if testing the acoustics of the room, the reality of it. He turned toward the counter. The man hadn’t moved.
"The pump work?" Jayce asked.
The man blinked once. His voice, when it came, was slow and low, southern drawl so old it felt brittle, like it belonged to the bones of the land more than the man himself. "Mostly," he said. "You’ll get what you need."
Jayce didn’t like the way that sat. He didn’t like how little the man had moved, how clean his shirt was, how his nails seemed almost glossy under the flickering light. He paid in cash. The man made change with deliberate care, fingers too long and too smooth.
When Jayce asked about the Orchard, the man’s face didn’t change. "Out past the fields," he said. "Don’t get many out that way."
The change was cold. Jayce held it longer than he should’ve. He walked out without another word, filled the tank under a sky that felt too low.
The road stretched on, narrower now. Less road and more suggestion. The map was useless; not because it was wrong—but because it was irrelevant. Whatever waited ahead wasn’t the kind of place you found. It found you.
Every town he passed looked the same—weather-beaten signage, windows smeared with the same grease, the same sun-blistered Coke machines and tired-eyed men loitering under awnings. He’d stopped keeping track. The names slid past unread, indistinguishable, letters bleeding together like ink in rain.
The corn pressed in, tall and brittle, their bodies curving inward, as if listening to the hum of the engine. The tires whispered. The wind had gone still. The world had taken a breath and forgotten how to exhale.
Jayce’s knuckles whitened around the wheel. His mouth tasted dry and metallic, like he’d bitten down on something live. He muttered, “Fucking hippies,” a grounding spell, a tether made of stale cynicism.
But the words felt hollow even as they left his tongue, sucked into the hum of the car’s dying AC.
He tried to imagine them—these people he was going to see. The commune. The orchard. Christ, what if they were the closed kind? The type that stared just a second too long. The type that asked, Do you believe in anything? and didn’t wait for your answer before dosing your coffee and sewing your name into a hymn.
He scratched at the back of his neck. Would he have to fake it? Pretend to be some rootless wanderer, soul all patched up in candle wax and incense? Could he pass for that? Loosen the tie, take up the lilt, pretend he cared about whatever moon cycle they were on? What if that wasn’t enough? What if the refusal alone was ritual?
A laugh rattled out of him, dry and cracked. He’d seen it before. Seen enough messiahs in bell bottoms to know how it ended. Usually in blood, or worse, in silence.
The radio, nothing but white noise now, seemed to pulse in and out of rhythm with the road. He swore he heard his own name whispered in it once, or maybe just a word that started the same. The scarecrow that he thought he saw, perhaps, just a few miles back, was there again. It had moved. Or he had. He blinked hard.
Time puddled strangely in his chest. The light looked wrong—amber one moment, leaden the next. He rubbed at his temples, but that only made the blur worse. The fields weren’t corn anymore. Not entirely. Some of them had changed, or he had misread them, or something was replacing the plants leaf by leaf. Shapes where there should not be shapes.
His fingers twitched. Maybe the girl was already dead . Maybe she’d wandered into the woods and found something older than whatever god her parents prayed to. Maybe she was waiting to be found, bones picked clean, smiling that brittle smile.
He didn’t like the way the thought sat in his mouth.
He turned the radio off.
The hum didn’t stop.
The map was a crumpled mess, but he looked at it anyway, squinting at it like it might apologize. It didn’t. The roads had all thinned to nothing. There were no towns anymore, just the idea of towns. He was, quite literally, driving into suggestion.
The motel appeared the way dreams do—half-known, already familiar. Neon blinked VACANCY, one letter dead. He didn’t remember turning in, but the tires caught gravel.
He sat with the engine running. The building hunched low against the sky, windows too dark. The sweat on his back had gone cold. He turned the key. The engine died, but the silence that followed felt too sudden, like someone had clapped a hand over the world’s mouth.
Tomorrow , he told himself. Just the last stretch. Then the orchard. Then the girl. Then whatever waits in the dirt that sings without a mouth.
He stepped out. The gravel under his shoes sounded like teeth.
The office door gaped. No bell, but something ticked in the walls. The counter sat empty. A chair still rocked slightly behind it, though no one had been there.
Jayce stood there for a long moment, unsure if he’d just arrived or had been here for hours. The air smelled like damp curtains and something vaguely medicinal, as if someone had tried to cover mildew with bleach and given up halfway through. The walls were yellow, but not by design—more the sickly residue of time, nicotine, and breath held too long.
He stepped up to the counter and found the bell. It stuck to his fingertip. He grimaced, “ew,” under his breath, sharp and reflexive. The thing gave a dull, gummy ding, not a sound so much as an apology.
Behind the desk: still, nothing—just a dark hallway leading nowhere and a rack of pamphlets so faded their destinations had long since been surrendered to rot. The silence in here wasn’t quiet—it was flattened , like all sound had been compressed into a single low frequency only the walls could hear. Even the buzzing of the light was restrained, as though uncertain whether it had permission to continue.
A figure emerged—not from the hallway, not from any door he could name, but there all at once. A woman, perhaps. Her hair was pinned too tightly, her smile was the kind meant to discourage questions. She wore a name tag that had been scratched blank.
“Room?” she asked. No tone. Just the syllable, like she might be reading off a card she’d never quite understood.
“Yeah,” Jayce said, rubbing the bell residue off on his jeans. “Just the night.”
She moved behind the counter as if she didn’t quite trust the floor. Her hands, when she passed him the key, were cold. The key was old, brass, attached to a chunk of green plastic with a number etched halfway off. Room 3.
He signed something. No ID. No questions. Just the impression of bureaucracy without the burden of its function.
As he turned to go, the woman said, almost to herself, "You’ll want to keep the window closed."
Jayce paused. “Why?”
She didn’t look at him. “Bugs.”
Of course. Bugs.
The hallway stretched longer than it should have. The floor dipped subtly left, then right, though the light fixtures stayed even. His shoes made no sound on the carpet, though it didn’t feel soft, more like walking on a book left soaking too long.
He stepped inside with the peculiar resignation of a man walking into his own wake—knowing the outcome, unwilling to contest it. The light flickered overhead, yellow and raw, catching in the condensation running lazy trails down the windows. It was as though the room perspired. The carpet, if it had once been green or blue or any conceivable color of human intention, had long since surrendered to an indistinct brown, the hue of rot and forgotten things. Jayce set down his camera case by the door, the clack of the metal against the laminate floor sharp, foreign—a sound not meant to be made here.
He did not check the mattress. He would not. There was a cruel relief in avoidance, the comfort of Schrödinger's bedbugs, and Jayce, pragmatic to his bones, supposed that was precisely the point. Let the infestation remain theoretical, the body unbitten, the skin untouched, and the mind a little less chewed through by the slow gnaw of certainty.
So he did not lift the stained coverlet, did not pry at the seams. He simply sat, back to the wall, bones creaking like the floorboards beneath his feet, and let his eyes take in the room, unwilling, but compelled.
The wallpaper was the worst thing he’d ever seen. A yellow—if it could be called that—once meant to be warm, now gone sour with age. The pattern sprawled in flamboyant tangles, a design trying and failing to mimic joy. It committed every artistic sin known to man.
Dull enough to confuse the eye, pronounced enough to provoke study, and when you followed its lame, uncertain curves for any length of time, they suddenly committed suicide—plunged off at outrageous angles, destroyed themselves in unheard-of contradictions. The pattern didn’t flow. It twitched. It itched behind the eye. It crawled.
He didn’t take his shoes off. Just laid back, arms crossed over his chest like a man waiting to be lowered into the ground, and let the hum of the light soak into him. He stared at the ceiling. He thought of the scarecrow. He thought of the girl. He thought of the way the fields leaned in, hungry.
There was something about it—the paper. The way it seemed to lean forward, ever so slightly, as though listening. As though it remembered being alive. A slow shift in the pattern, not visible, not real, just the impression of motion, like something that had moved and stopped before you could see it, like footsteps you could never quite hear, but always feel.
Jayce rubbed his eyes, hand gritty with road dust and sweat, and stared down at his boots. The dirt crusted around the soles didn’t seem to be his. It was too dark, too thick. Smelled faintly sweet. He didn’t remember stepping in anything. He didn’t remember much of the road in those last few hours—just the endless rhythm, the fields pressed close, and the radio murmuring things he couldn’t translate, static thick with intention.
He didn’t know how long he sat there. The room’s shape changed around him—not literally, not in any way he could name, but it changed. The bed seemed closer. The walls farther. The ceiling bowed, or perhaps it never had. The corners held shadows that were not cast by light, and the sound of his own breathing grew too loud, then too faint, then distant altogether.
The wallpaper pulsed.
Jayce exhaled, stood, and paced once, twice, three times—then stopped.
The damn window made him feel uneasy. Not just annoyed, but a kind of twitching discomfort that set up shop behind his eyes and spread, rootlike, through the softer parts of his mind. It was absurd, of course—just a window. Glass. A latch. A frame. But its presence offended something fundamental in him. Why put a window here, if it wasn’t meant to be opened? Was it to tempt? To test? To offer the illusion of escape before reminding you that you were never really meant to leave? To let you gaze into the dark and convince yourself it gazed back?
He chewed the inside of his cheek raw, pacing toward it like a man approaching an adversary. The closer he got, the more certain he became that it had always been watching him. That even now, it expected something. The air grew stiller as he reached for the handle. His fingers curled around it, found resistance—it stuck, as though it knew—and then, slowly, it gave way.
He opened it a crack. Just a sliver.
The air that drifted in was not air. Not quite. It was thicker. Warmer. It carried the scent of something green, but not fresh—green gone too far, cloying and wet, as though the breath of the orchard itself had found him here and decided to linger in his throat.
Jayce shut it again, slowly, carefully, like one sealing off a wound. He backed away two steps before he realized he was doing it. The window remained. Innocuous. Watching. Waiting.
Sleep, when it took him, came down like a shroud soaked through—not rest, but suffocation. There was no darkness, no silence. Only the orchard.
He stood beneath the trees, their branches heavy with white blossoms, obscene in their abundance. The sky had gone to bruised violet, light thick and soupy, pressing down. Petals drifted in slow spirals, falling like snow in a place that had never known winter, and stuck to his skin—clung wet to his lips, his eyelids, the sweat slicking his throat. They tasted wrong. Not like flowers, but like copper and clover, the sharp tang of something living and too alive.
The air pulsed with sound—a hymn, or something like it. Not melody. A hum, low and constant, rising in waves that made his teeth ache. Gregorian chants, he thought at first. Then a folk song, something half-remembered from a dream or a childhood never lived. The notes slipped, twisted, never resolving, like something searching for a shape.
A voice, soft, disembodied, yet close enough to breathe on his neck.
“You hear them too, don’t you? The choir.”
Jayce turned, but there was nothing. Only trees. Trunks slick with sap, bark glistening like flesh. He knelt without meaning to, knees sinking into the soft, wet loam, and pressed his ear to the soil.
The song was clearer here.
Not voices.
Not human.
Wet, clicking mandibles, the chitter of larvae teeth gnawing in rhythm, the earth trembling with the sound of them. The ground vibrated, a slow pulse like a dying heart. Blossoms drifted into his mouth, thick, sticky, tasting of metal and milk, and he could not spit them out.
He dug.
His hands tore at the soil, nails splitting, dirt filling his mouth, his nose, and still he dug. The roots writhed, not stiff but pliant—tongues, slick and muscular, curling around his wrists, his ankles. Caressing, not restraining. Inviting. The earth opened to him not with violence, but with hunger, and he slid down, pulled beneath the surface like a lover drawn into bed.
Down into the roots.
Into the cavern.
It stretched beneath the orchard, a vast cathedral of dirt and bone, the roots arching overhead like veins, like tendons, slick with sap that oozed slow as pus, yellow-green, rank and sweet. The smell of rot and clover, of something growing where nothing should grow.
The bodies hung from the ceiling, cocooned in silk and bark, swaying gently. Their faces wrapped in parchment, eyes stitched shut. Thorn-vines sewn through their mouths, lips pulled taut, torn and bleeding where they’d struggled once and no longer did. Their throats bulged, and the singing—yes, the singing—was the sound of larvae writhing inside them, squirming and clicking, a chorus of teeth and wet muscle.
Disciples.
No. Not that. Fertile ground.
Jayce tried to scream, but his mouth was full of blossoms.
The roots slid over his body, tongues slick with sap, pressing into his ears, his mouth, down his throat. He gagged. Gasped. Breathed the earth in.
A voice—not from the roots, not from the bodies—from inside him.
“It’s you.”
He tried to rise. Couldn’t. The roots held him, not tight, not cruel, but loving. Devout.
“It’s you.”
The petals clung to his skin, bloomed from his mouth, his eyes. He choked.
“It’s you.”
Jayce opened his eyes. Sharp. All at once.
No gasping. No screaming. Just breath returning like an afterthought. The room hung around him in its familiar wrongness—the light overhead still burning its low, jaundiced hum, the wallpaper twitching gently in his periphery like it had been waiting for him to look away. The air was thick, the kind of stale that coats the inside of the mouth. He didn’t feel rested. He didn’t feel anything.
It took him only half a moment to register where he was. The motel. Room 3. The bed beneath him was unreasonably firm, the kind of firm that didn’t speak of quality so much as punishment. He shifted, and his spine voiced its displeasure—each vertebra a rusted hinge.
The bed, truly, was a menace. His back would not thank him.
He sat up slowly, elbows on knees, palms pressed to his face. The dream clung in fragments. Not visuals—those had already begun to peel away like wet leaves—but impressions. Texture. Taste. The sensation of dirt beneath fingernails. A pressure behind his eyes, like something still blooming in the soft dark.
Jayce looked down at his hands before he realized he’d moved. Nothing under the nails. But the skin of his palms was dry, dusted with something pale. He rubbed them on his thighs, once, twice. It didn’t quite come off.
He stood. The room tilted slightly—not physically, but perceptually, as if the corners had all shuffled when he wasn’t looking. He blinked. The window remained shut. Still watching.
He did not look at the wallpaper.
He crossed to the sink instead, ran the tap until the pipes shuddered and groaned out something that could be called water. It smelled faintly of rust and copper. He cupped it in his hands and splashed his face.
The mirror above the sink was scratched, warped at the edges. His reflection looked the same, but it didn’t feel the same. Something about the tilt of his head. The slackness of his mouth.
He dried his face on the motel towel. The fabric was coarse. Sandpaper in cloth’s clothing.
What was needed was coffee. A drive. A road that felt real.
Jayce contemplated a shower, but then thought better of it. One glance at the mottled curtain, the way the light didn’t quite reach the tiled floor—and he decided against it. There were, after all, kinds of filth that stuck longer than road dust. He’d settle for washing his face again, maybe, once he’d eaten.
Food. Yes. That was next. Something banal. Something solid. Something with weight.
He thought about the gas station— the gas station. The only one he’d seen for miles. Turning back made him feel... off. Not afraid, not exactly. Just uneasy. Like the road might not receive him in the same way it had the first time. Like going backward might mean stepping into something that had already made a space for him.
Not superstition—not quite. More a gut instinct. He got those often.
Whether that was something in his nature, or a skill carved out of necessity by years spent reading his mother’s grief like weather patterns, he never figured out. He only knew how to listen for the drop in barometric pressure before the storm. Knew how to sense when the air changed. When the quiet stopped being just quiet.
Still, he needed to eat. He’d drive. Not far. Not back. There had to be another station. Something closer to the orchard. Something new.
He grabbed his keys. Didn’t look at the window. Walked out into the day like a man pretending the air didn’t smell sweet with rot.
The next gas station he encountered—twenty, maybe forty minutes down a road that bent more than it should have—was no less menacing in its bones. The gravel still crunched too soft, the signage still peeled like sunburnt skin, and the glass door still stuttered on its hinges. But the woman working there—that was different.
She was the kind of person you imagined at the center of a dozen old family photos. Plump in that maternal way that didn’t feel judgmental, just solid. Apron folded at the waist even though this wasn’t a place for aprons. She had a voice that sounded like it had sung lullabies and given advice on pie crusts. Her smile didn’t feel rehearsed. Her eyes didn’t flick like she was waiting for something to happen.
Jayce watched her from the door for a beat longer than he meant to. She was wiping down the counter, humming something tuneless. The kind of woman, he thought, who hosted Sunday cookouts with too much potato salad and folding chairs that never matched. The kind whose kids came home from college not just on Thanksgiving and Christmas, but in October, and March, and once in June just because they missed her.
He didn’t trust it. Not really. But it softened something behind his ribs.
The bell above the door gave a cheerful jingle as he stepped inside. A lie, but a pleasant one.
She looked up, smiling with her whole face. “Mornin’, hon,” she said, voice warm and familiar as a kitchen light left on late. “You look like you could use coffee. And something greasy.”
Jayce huffed a short laugh, instinctive. “You read minds, or just good at reading faces?”
“Oh, both,” she said with a wink. “But mostly the second. Pot’s fresh. Eggs and sausage if you’ve got ten minutes. You want toast or a biscuit?”
“Whatever’s hot,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’ve been on the road since... too long.”
She nodded knowingly. “Take a seat over there, I’ll bring it out. You want cream and sugar?”
“Just black,” he said. “And thank you. Really.”
Her eyes crinkled. “Course, darlin’. You let me know if you need anything else.”
He sat at the Formica table tucked beside the snack aisle, the seat still warm from sun filtering through the dusty window. He let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. Something about her made the noise in his head dull to a murmur. She felt real. Solid. Like a lighthouse seen from too far out.
But still—he glanced at the window. Still. Still.
The hum hadn’t stopped. Not entirely.
He let his eyes wander—past the rack of dog-eared magazines, past the spinning chip display, until they landed on the floor near the cooler where the condensation pooled. There, against the linoleum, marched a line of ants—neat, precise, purposeful. Jayce fixated. He watched them move in their slow, relentless order, each one blind and certain. There was something in their procession that snagged him, caught his thoughts like a hook in soft fabric. He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table, watching as if the pattern might rearrange itself into meaning.
The woman’s voice cut through it—gentle, like someone nudging a child out of a too-long stare. “Coffee’s comin’, hon.”
Jayce blinked, sat back. “Right. Yeah. Thanks.”
She bustled over with a smile, the kind that had weathered years without souring. She set the mug down with practiced ease, followed by a plate—steam curling up from the eggs, the sausage, a biscuit that glistened with butter.
“Where you headed, anyway?” she asked, casual, but not idle.
Jayce stirred the coffee though he took it black. “West,” he said. “Some orchard. Supposed to be a story in it.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you a reporter?”
“Something like that.”
She nodded, the kind of nod that said she knew more than she let on, or thought she did. “Well. Ain’t much out west but dust and trees and folks who don’t take kindly to strangers.”
Jayce smiled thinly, breaking the biscuit in half. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
He took a bite—hot, too salty, perfect. The kind of grease that carved out the lingering ghosts of sleep and left you steadier. He chewed, sipped his coffee, then glanced up at her as she wiped down the counter again.
“You ever hear about a girl going missing?” he asked, voice light, like it wasn’t the reason he was here. “College kid. Light hair, sort of bright-eyed in a stubborn way. Might’ve passed through this way on her way to the orchard.”
The woman paused, cloth held mid-air. “Can’t say I have,” she said, slowly. “But then again, girls come and go out here all the time. Some of ‘em looking for something. Some of ‘em trying to lose something. The orchard pulls in both.”
Jayce raised an eyebrow. “That what it does? Pulls?”
She gave him a look, head cocked slightly. “That’s the word folks use. I don’t know if it’s a place or a notion. Could be both. Most people don’t go looking for it unless it’s already found ‘em first.”
He nodded slowly, letting that settle. “She sent a postcard to her parents. Said the orchard was blooming. That she could hear them singing under the soil.”
This time, the pause was longer. Then: “Now that,” she said softly, “sounds like someone who’s already gone.”
Jayce took another sip of coffee, watching her over the rim of the cup. “So is it like... a known place? Around here?”
She shrugged, wiping down the same patch of counter again, though it was already clean. “Depends on what you mean by known. Folks around these parts, we know of it. Know about it? Not so much. They don’t cause trouble or nothin’. Keep to themselves. Always have.”
Jayce tilted his head. “But you remember them.”
She smiled at that—something wry, tired, fond the way someone might speak about a scar that never healed quite right. “We remember they’re out there. But ask anyone what year they showed up, what it was like before, and you’ll get a lot of blank stares. It’s like tryin’ to remember your first tooth. You don’t. It’s just always been there. You forget them until something reminds you. And even then...”
She let the thought trail off.
Jayce frowned faintly, the heat of the coffee not quite touching the chill spreading low in his gut.
“They come into town?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” she said. “For supplies. Not often. Not all of them.”
Jayce made a mental note. The language was vague—deliberate, perhaps. He'd heard this kind of thing before. The Process Church had started small, after all. Hell, even Manson’s people had kept chickens and vegetable gardens before the knives came out. There was always this quiet stage, the ambiguous hush before belief curdled into something else. The blend of superstition and fact. The stories that blurred just enough at the edges that no one asked too many questions.
Other cults he’d followed left the same trail: people who lived apart, who operated on their own calendar, their own rules, who blurred the lines between spiritual conviction and social disappearance. The ones who didn’t need to hide because no one thought to look. The ones you forgot until you didn’t.
He leaned back slightly, eyeing her. “They look different?”
The woman shrugged. “Not really. Not in the way you’d expect. A little quiet, sure. Pale, some of ‘em. Like they don’t get much sun, or sleep. But they’re polite. Soft-spoken. Don’t buy junk food. Don’t hang around. Just... pass through.”
Jayce nodded, trying to picture it. Trying not to imagine that he’d already seen one of them and hadn’t known it. He couldn’t shake the sense that if he did meet one, he wouldn’t recognize them by what they looked like—but by what they didn’t.
He chuckled, light and probing. “So, not much trouble from those folks, huh?”
She snorted softly, shaking her head as she poured more coffee into his mug. “Lord, no. Not like that. Quiet as mice. Don’t come in drunk, don’t pick fights, don’t even make much noise when they pump gas. Like ghosts with wallets.”
Jayce smiled at that, letting the image sit. “Sounds like model citizens.”
“Well,” she said, drawing out the word. “Model citizens don’t usually smell like rosemary and wet bark. And they sure don’t stare through you like you’re made of glass.”
Jayce leaned forward slightly, chin resting on his hand. “You ever talk to any of them?”
She considered that, looking down into the coffee pot like it might hold the answer. “Not really. They’re polite, like I said. But not... chatty. Not curious. It’s like they already know whatever they came in for. You don’t ask questions, they don’t offer answers. And everyone’s happier that way.”
Jayce nodded slowly. “You ever get names?”
Another pause. “Not ones I remember. Though there was one, a man—young, maybe your age. Real sharp eyes. Real still. He asked for a specific type of honey I didn’t carry. Seemed disappointed, like he expected me to have it. Like it was my fault I didn’t.”
“Did he say where he was from?”
She gave a half-smile. “You’re asking too much, now. I sell gas and sausage. Not stories.”
Jayce laughed softly, a little sheepish. “Force of habit.”
He let the moment rest, the lull between words filling with the soft clatter of dishes, the tick of the ceiling fan overhead. He turned back to his food, now lukewarm but still edible, and ate without thinking, the way a tired man might. The flavors dulled, grease settling low in his gut like ballast.
His mind, though, remained sharp. Turning. Clicking into old grooves.
These damn cultists. Always the same. They talked in riddles, lived like ghosts, made the ordinary feel off just enough to unnerve you. Rosemary and wet bark—he’d file that detail away. The odd requests. The absence of names. The way people talked around them instead of through them.
Jayce had seen it before. Every group had its flavor, sure, but underneath the incense and incantations, the communal gardens and gentle smiles, there was always the same shape. A hunger wrapped in purpose. A story they told themselves so often it calcified.
These people—they didn’t just believe . They breathed it.
He wiped his mouth, drained the last of the coffee, and leaned back, his notebook already building itself in his head. The orchard. The missing girl. The ones who didn’t cause trouble. The ones no one quite remembered arriving.
He stood, stretched, and brought his mug to the counter out of old, polite habit. “Listen,” he said with a chuckle, fishing the map from his jacket pocket and unfolding it over the clean patch of laminate. “Either I’m worse with directions than I thought, or this thing’s lying to me. You wouldn’t happen to know how to get to this Orchard place, would you?”
The woman glanced at the map, then at him, then back down again. She didn’t touch it.
“No maps match,” she said, simple, flat.
Jayce blinked. “Sorry?”
“No maps match,” she repeated. “You ever notice that? Ask three people around here, you’ll get three different routes. Place don’t stay still long enough to pin down. Like it moves when no one’s lookin’.”
Jayce let out a low laugh, half amused, half unnerved. “Right. Great. A shape-shifting orchard. Of course.”
Still, she gave him directions. Vague, but better than nothing—follow the road west until the power lines bend toward the trees, pass the old church with no steeple, turn left at the broken fence no one remembers building. Just past the silo with the peeling paint, the road becomes gravel. And after that, the gravel becomes something else.
Jayce thanked her, left a few crumpled bills on the counter, and stepped back into the heat. The sun had climbed while he was inside, dragging the shadows with it. He started the car, map forgotten on the seat beside him.
Back to the road.
Back to the Orchard.
The road stretched long and senseless ahead, familiar enough to lull and yet changed in subtle, cruel ways. The towns had thinned to almost nothing, the signs unreadable, weathered away. Ghost towns now—rows of peeling houses left like teeth in a jawbone, vacant windows gaping, curtains half-torn, fluttering faintly. Atomic test sites, maybe. An asbestos mine, gone belly-up. It didn’t matter. The effect was the same.
Jayce felt a pull each time he passed, a low animal urge to slow the car, kill the engine, climb out. Wander down the empty streets. Peek behind the curtains. See what was left of the perfect little families who once sat neatly inside.
But he didn’t stop.
Didn’t trust himself to.
The trees along the road—what few still stood, stripped near bare by sun and wind—had taken on a slick sheen. Looked lush, somehow, despite the heat curling everything dry. Wet, glistening. The bark catching light in ways bark shouldn’t, shadows pooling darker beneath them than seemed natural. Every so often, the corner of his eye would catch the glint of something else between the branches—a flash of white, a curve, like a blossom heavy with dew, like a face half-turned, like something just slipping out of view.
He stared too long. Had to shake himself out of it. There, finally, the silo.
The road narrowed, shoulder crumbling into dust and weed. A turn appeared where none had been marked—just a gap in the tree line, a path swallowed by shadow. Jayce slowed, frowned, then pulled the wheel, the tires crunching over gravel that looked like bone.
The car came to a halt.
The trees here had grown too dense, gnarled branches interlocking overhead to form a canopy so thick the light turned green. The path ahead was no road. Not really. It was suggestion. Animal trail. Ritual corridor. He'd have to go by foot.
“Of course,” he muttered, slamming the gear into park.
He stepped out into the hush, cursing low under his breath. “Goddamn cultists,” he muttered. “Gotta pick the most inaccessible patch of nowhere like it’s a goddamn fairy tale. Of course they wouldn’t want a nice field by the highway. No, no—gotta be mystical, gotta live in a damn Narnia.”
He popped the trunk and yanked out his camera bag, the strap catching on something, sending a small avalanche of cassette tapes clattering to the ground. He cursed louder.
“And Randall,” he added darkly, slinging the bag over his shoulder. “That bastard probably knew. Bet he’s sitting at his desk right now with his stupid cigarette and that smug ‘you’ve got a thing for weird’ smirk—”
He cut himself off with a grunt, adjusting the strap, checking his recorder, patting his jacket pocket for his notes.
“And me,” he muttered. “Stupid me. Who else signs up to go ghost-hunting in daylight for a girl who probably just got high and married a tree?”
Still, his boots found the path. His breath hitched once, then steadied.
The trees closed behind him.